In the final days of perhaps the
closest presidential race in several decades, historian and critically acclaimed author Joseph Ellis offered an MHC audience some timely insight and perspective on American political leadership. Packing Gamble Auditorium last week, the Weissman Center for Leadership event also coincided with the publication of Ellis's new book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf). Mount Holyoke's Ford Foundation Professor of History discussed the evolution of presidential campaigns and concluded by sharing his political leanings and highlighting issues that he predicts will emerge as key domestic policy concerns in the near future.

Addressing the topic of “leadership,” Ellis challenged nineteenth-century historian Henry Adams's sentiment that the history of American presidencies reflects a reverse Darwinian trend, a “devolution” of leadership ability. By way of argument, he pointed to Plutarch's definition of the term “leader,” which the ancient Greek biographer claimed to have borrowed from the Greek orator Demosthenes, and which Alexander Hamilton read in the first session of the constitutional convention in 1787. “As the general marches at the head of his troops,” Ellis quoted, “so might wise politicians—if I dare use the expression—to march at the head of affairs, in so much as they ought not to wait for the event to know what measure to take, but measures which they have taken ought to produce the event.”

Given this definition, said Ellis, he sees democracy's pursuit of great leaders as paradoxical. A leader, “who defies popular opinion and is far ahead of the majority view at that moment,” and a democrat, “who represents the populace of the majority,” are, Ellis suggested, incompatible. He noted that in a democracy “leadership cannot afford to be too far ahead of populace.” And yet, the nation's original founders “were unique” in that they were “always a step ahead.”
The lesson of American history, said Ellis, is that “great leadership at the national level emerges only in times of great crisis.” While historians “agree about almost nothing,” he said, “the one thing that they do agree on” is which American presidents are “unquestionably the three greatest.” Significantly, all three—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—emerged at critical junctures in American history. Washington faced the crisis of the nation's founding; Lincoln confronted the threat of a divided Union; and Roosevelt provided leadership during the Great Depression, later responding to the emerging totalitarian threat posed by Hitler and the Japanese.

Today, on the brink of the 2000 presidential election, “the only challenge we face is a product of America's unprecedented prosperity and its current status as the unquestioned global hegemon,” said Ellis. “Not a moment in time when historically we should expect to see great leadership rise to the top.” Speaking with humor and candor, Ellis mocked the current campaign's central issue: “How are we going to spend the surplus?”

But should a crisis emerge in such hot spots as the Middle East, he said, would Gore or Bush be able to respond? “Historical wisdom on this,” he suggested, is, “you never know.” Jefferson, he said, was described in 1800 by the president of Yale as “an atheist, an infidel, and a hypocrite.” Lincoln was characterized by most of the northeastern press as an “illiterate bumpkin from the prairies of Illinois.” And Roosevelt was famously described by a supreme court justice as having “a first-class temperament, third-rate mind.” Quipped Ellis, “If you will, George W.”

How, he asked, did we get Bush and Gore? Or “Gush and Bore,” as he deliberately revised. What is allegedly a democratic process, he said, “has evolved into essentially a money-raising process. And while it's not sure-fire, it is very, very likely that whoever has accumulated the largest campaign treasury at the beginning of the primary season will be the nominee of his or her respective party.” “In some sense,” he added, the corporate powers and organized labor “make decisions about who they'll bet on early on in the process, before the primary season, and those people have huge leads.” He summarized the results as “a Darwinian process, a quasi-democratic process, essentially driven by money.”

The relatively uninspiring nature of today's electoral choices was dramatically underscored when Ellis read a passage from Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, highlighting the contest two hundred years ago between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—the second presidential election in United States history. He described the contestants as “soul mates” and “the odd couple of the American Revolution.” They were, respectively, New England's “highly combustible, ever combative, mile-a-minute talker,” read Ellis, and Virginia's “always cool and self-contained enigma,” who, despite their ideological differences, loved, trusted, and admired one another. Prior to the presidential contest, the pair had worked side by side in the Continental Congress and as members of the committee drafting the Declaration of Independence. They were “charter members” of what they called “the band of brothers,” who had earned their fame as a revolutionary team.

The Revolutionary credentials of Adams and Jefferson, said Ellis, were the key criteria considered in the election process. “The leadership of the American Revolutionary generation are people who, at those propitious moments in '76 and '87, stepped forward to take positions that looked to be very, very, very risky,” he emphasized, since “there had never been a successful war for colonial independence in modern history…. And there had never been a republic established over a land mass this size.”
Ironically, Ellis pointed out, these early leaders were “a step ahead” of the public in their vision for the new nation. But successful leaders today must remain in step with the populace; the successful presidential candidate, he suggested, will not get too far ahead of popular opinion. “Leadership at the national level in a democratic society must be in great part procrastination and ‘followship',” he said.

Ellis touted as “Plutarchian” leaders former presidential candidate John McCain, for his style and candor as well as his leadership on campaign finance reform, and Ralph Nader, for his historic commitment to “a kind of populist agenda opposing corporate power.” He said that he will vote for Al Gore on November 7 and predicted that the three most significant domestic issues of the near future will be health care, for which he sees the development of a universal plan as inevitable; gun control, which he believes will be strengthened; and gay rights, likely to become “the new civil right.” But Ellis said he believes that if either candidate today fully supported these “inevitable” future developments, “it would cost him the election.”